It is fascinating to see how small instances can turn your life. I still remember the day when I found “My life and Work”, a book by Henry Ford in the dad’s collection of books which destined my career in Industrial engineering. I was encouraged by this American business magnate, who brought the concept of mass production and assembly line for manufacturing the affordable automobile. This inspired me to pursue engineering in this field.

With this motivation, I earnestly worked hard to get the admission and scholarship in the reputed industrial engineering program at SGSITS, state’s top public university. During four years, I worked on diverse research projects ranging from developing customer value function deployment matrix to developing the methodology for sales forecasting. I would like to take this opportunity to explicitly discuss each project and its connection with my research aspirations to pursue the master’s degree in Industrial Engineering.Each year in the university stimulated and shaped me to fit into the research field. Participating in the national conference for state of art paper presentation on JIT manufacturing marked the beginning of my research career. What started as dabbling attempt turned into a serious business when I got an opportunity to research in India’s most prestigious research institute IIT-Bombay with the dedicated guide and excellent resources. Due to the scarcely available literature on the quantitative analysis of customer value, it was not a cake walk to comprehend and apply complex statistical analysis, create a structural model to analyze interrelationship among drivers of customer value and develop the customer value function deployment matrix for consumer durable product.

Successful completion of this project motivated me to apply this approach in reverse supply chain for the refurbished mobile phone where fault tree model was developed followed by sensitivity analysis to verify the model in different situations, this research is accepted for publication in conference journal of the springer. Continuing the pursuit, for the thesis, I developed the casual model for sales forecasting, in which all factors were taken into account based on the case study using regression analysis on SYSTAT software. Methodology considering the impact of overall factors on sales enabled us to accurately forecast sales of heavy-duty vehicles which earned acceptance for publication and is published in the Industrial Engineering Journal.In my career journey, I worked on a project related to data quality issues in existing system arising during the development of ERP software for a manufacturing firm Data quality barriers were identified in various data migration processes and data preparation process was improved. In this regard, I can see the culmination of this experience with the research work of Prof.Vaneet Aggrawal on sub-space clustering under missing data. Eventually, this work piqued my interest to work in the combined field of data science and industrial engineering.

To achieve this aim, I believe MS in Industrial engineering at Purdue University is well aligned with my research interest. I found the curriculum to be highly application-oriented. Further, e-learning and workshops attended to learn R and Python and experience with statistical tools like AHP and regression, I believe I can contribute sufficiently to ongoing projects and would also be able to leverage the experience of working in the CLAN lab for machine learning.

The multidisciplinary problem-solving environment will give a great hands-on experience for me. This will be a good platform to jump start my research centric career and would be able to help in meeting the rigour of this demanding domain of Industrial engineering.